PhD Opportunity – Ubiquitin signals in Parkinson’s disease

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Outline: Ubiquitin signalling controls almost every cellular process in humans, including targeting poorly folded proteins for destruction to prevent them harming the cell. When ubiquitin signalling goes wrong, many different disease states can occur, including neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinsons Disease (PD).

One gene associated with PD is parkin, which gives rise to an enzyme responsible for tagging many different proteins with ubiquitin. The aims of this project are to understand on a biochemical and molecular level how parkin targets a specific substrate, Miro1, and how the ubiquitin signals applied to Miro1 are edited & interpreted.

This project will involve expressing and purifying multiprotein complexes, and developing protocols for generating the ubiquitin signals, and enzymatic assays for the regulation of these signals.

Techniques:

1. Cloning and sequencing
2. Protein expression purification, and biochemistry
3. Assay development
4. X-ray crystallography
5. Cryo Electron Microscopy
6. Analysis of high resolution structures

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